13 ms·

It sounds like Paris is regulating to beat a problem that is at least in a a significant part caused by regulation. Paris has very extraordinary tenant protecti

It sounds like Paris is regulating to beat a problem that is at least in a a significant part caused by regulation. Paris has very extraordinary tenant protections, even for people who weren't actually tenants and who don't pay their rent. The article [0] I read is in Finnish and now behind a paywall, but it explains that a woman more or less out of her good heart allowed someone to stay in her flat for a time while she was on an assignment in another country. The person staying in the apartment never really paid any rent, but became a "tenant" so that it is impossible to evict her. The owner has to refurbish and fix the apartment at her own cost, while the person staying there is protected by law and lives there and pays nothing. And makes a horrible mess which the owner has to pay. It is obvious that such examples send a very strong message: if you're away for a year or two, DON'T give your apartment to let. Keep it empty. If you plan never to use it, then sell it. But if you intent to come back it, just keep it empty. Everything else is too risky, due to the regulations. Then it's now fashionable to frame this as a xenophobic "rich foreigners come and hoard our apartments and cause housing shortage". The actually guilty to the shortage is local, populist regulation. [0] http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000002659821.html http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000002659821.html

forrestthewoods 10y ago
> It sounds like Paris is regulating to beat a problem that is at least in a a significant part caused by regulation. The solution to regulation is always more regulation.
- sonthonax 10y ago
  It very possibly is. Society is not a software algorithm.
  - forrestthewoods 10y ago
    No. But at scale members within a society behave in a reliable way. It's often predictable. Sometimes it requires the benefit of hindsight to realize a behavior choice. But going forward it's generally pretty reliable. Those bad behaviors are often incentivized by regulation. And the best fix is often to simply remove those regulations. Not by adding more. Especially when it comes to real estate, zoning, and rent control.
anigbrowl 10y ago
I need something better than anecdotal evidence for your claim that tenancy rights are the primary problem. You can find horror stories about problem tenants in any city, same as you can find horror stories about terrible landlords. Do you have quantitative evidence that documents the scale of this problem? Property vacancies, speculation, rents, and related issues are hardly unique to Paris; this is an unsolved problem in economics precisely because living accommodations are not simply fungible commodities and applying crude economic models to complex economic situations leads to inefficient outcomes.
- inuhj 10y ago
  IMO you are being a bit lazy here not researching the issue yourself. These kinds of comments are easy to make but hard to respond to. Do your own research and respond with what you find before asking OP to do the same.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    ptaipale is the one who made the assertion, the onus is on him to provide evidence, not the person questioning the assertion.
- ttoinou 10y ago
  Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything. All I can tell you is that here in France property squatter have rights, and the more the original owner awaits before calling the police, the less he has a chance to recover his property and evict squatters. I would be interested in knowing if others country have the same laws ?
  - collyw 10y ago
    "Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything." Still better than a single anecdote on the internet.
  - ABCLAW 10y ago
    Plenty of other jurisdictions have similar laws. Adverse possession is a common law legal doctrine designed to prevent the non-use of resources by an absent owner.
raverbashing 10y ago
Not something exclusive to Paris http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/james-regan-professional-tenant-evicted-1.3862446 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/james-regan-profession... And if you leave someone in your apartment/house at least sign a contract.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  A contract saying what? They void their unavoidable tenant rights?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Rent is X Euros per month, but is waived for the 1st N months. A form of rent warranty is required after N months (this might be on the tenancy laws already, I'm not sure) Or, you know, get references before you let anyone live in your place
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      I don't see how any of that helps the situation at hand: how can I use my existing property to give an acquaintance a roof over their heads?
yardie 10y ago
I haven't read the story but there is a lot of misconception in this familiar story. As it is the same in most developed countries once someone moved into a flat it becomes their dwelling. This is independent of rent. If I let a friend stay with me and not pay rent while they get their life together i can't kick them out. The owner is a member of the building association. She agreed to pay maintenance and renovation charges. That is an agreement between her and the association. The tenant did not make that agreement so has no say in it. There is a process to evict someone. This owner sounds like she doesn't want or can't be bothered to follow it. It's a long heartbreaking process that involves courts and police. And due to abuse in the past the judges and police want to be sure every step is followed.
- trollsonson 10y ago
  I haven't read the article, but here's my comment on it. Everyone knows developed countries must have squatters rights. I haven't researched that, but I'll go ahead and assert it anyway. There are no facts or fact based opinions in my post. I'm gonna practice typing, and you're gonna waste your time reading this. Welcome to HN. I feel smart.
crdoconnor 10y ago
Hoarding of inner city land occurs because inner city land is valuable and naturally scarce. It is valuable because it is possible to leverage it to effectively levy a privatized tax on others for its use (rent). Gold is also hoarded and not used because it is scarce and valuable, not regulation. It feels odd to have to point that out. There is basically one (good) solution to this problem: tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes). That doesn't eliminate scarcity but it reduces the incentive to hoard and it reduces speculation. Increased land value (which in cities is created by the community) would instead accrue to the community via taxes. Hoarding and not using land would lead to heavy losses. Property investment would become more of a normal business where high quality construction matters more than making lucky gambles (like the kind that made Trump rich).
- mafribe 10y ago
  tax land values higher If you don't also remove, or at least weaken, strict zoning laws, who would be able to pay high property taxes?
- kmicklas 10y ago
  > tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes). More specifically, taxing land irrespective of the value of what's built on top of it.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    Ideally LVT, but it isn't necessarily prudent to spend political capital to set up an entirely new form of taxation. Property taxes are still a close enough approximation of LVT in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and London where the majority of the value of a property is derived from its location.
- Applejinx 10y ago
  In Vermont USA we have homestead declaration. I declare the home I'm living in as my homestead, can only do it once, and the property taxes are less hardcore because it's my home. I approve of this arrangement. Why, just because land ownership CAN be a money sink for abstracted accumulation of wealth and power, MUST it be that rewarded money sink? Why is it sacrosanct that people should be able to hoard 'location' beyond what they personally use? Note that I don't think there's a real limit to how big of a property can be 'home'. Versailles? Knock yourself out. You figure you should own 12 Versailles, and keep 11 of them empty? Uh nope. There is only so much area on the planet.
plantain 10y ago
Sydney and Melbourne have similar housing bubbles and vacancy rates, despite having extremely oppressive tenant laws.
- somecallitblues 10y ago
  What laws? Home owners can charge whatever rent they want, evict you with a few weeks notice without giving any reason for it, raise the rent as much as they want etc. There's no affordable housing in either of the cities. Investors are hoarding properties and claiming negative gearing and locking first home buyers out of the market. Renters need better protection in Australia if the government is unwilling to do anything about the negative gearing and housing market, which they said they won't do anything about. After all they're paying off these assholes' properties. Edit: good analysis in this podcast if you're interested http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-11-07/7997896 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-1...
- Johnythree 10y ago
  Melbourne will soon have a Vacant house tax as well. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vacant-property-tax-expected-to-raise-80m-in-push-to-increase-housing-affordability-20170305-gur4zn.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vacant-property-tax-expect...
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  It is possible to have similar symptoms but a different core issue, especially when comparing 2 countries with very different regulations.
Retric 10y ago
The correct solution to this problem is insurance. If the risk is say 0.1% and you get 1k per month in rent for 1 year then. The insurance could pay out up to 1 million and cost 100$ per month leaving a huge net gain. However, even if it takes 3 years to elect someone that's not even close to 1M in damages.
bsder 10y ago
> Paris has very extraordinary tenant protections, even for people who weren't actually tenants and who don't pay their rent. The problem is that for every story about bad tenants, I can find a story about a shitty landlord. And, often, then shitty landlord affects WAY higher a number of people since shitty landlords all too often have multiple properties. This is actually a bit of dilemma in small towns in the US. Many small towns have a very poor rental market, so they have many tenants who can barely pay. This also means that the landlords need to keep rental prices very low--which translates into shitty slumlord rentals. However, if regulation steps in to make the place better, it effectively bankrupts the landlord who then abandons the place and now the city gets the joy of what to do with the abandoned property.
kafkaesq 10y ago
If you're away for a year or two, DON'T give your apartment to let. But the main issue, in the large, with the epidemic of vacant apartments isn't that these people all just happen to be going away for a year or two. It's that the apartments are bought solely as vehicles of speculation (or to store and/or launder wealth) -- and are effectively no longer "living spaces", in any meaningful sense. Then it's now fashionable to frame this as a xenophobic "rich foreigners come and hoard our apartments and cause housing shortage". Yet there's a lot of evidence that this is exactly what's happening (substituting "exacerbate" for "cause"). And it's not "fashionable" or "xenophobic" to call something what it is. It's called speaking plainly and directly.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  BTW, forgot to add this example of "hoarding". An apartment not used for 70 years... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris-apartment-untouched-70-years-Treasure-trove-finally-revealed-owner-locked-fled-outbreak-WWII.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris...
- ptaipale 10y ago
  At least where I live (Helsinki region in Finland), the main issue with empty apartments is not that they are bought as vehicles of speculation. It's that there's not that much vacancy to speak of. The numbers are inflated in the discourse, often ignoring several factors: 1) in a rental market, there is a natural vacancy rate of a few percent due to people moving every few ears, and that 2) apartments that are in statistics "vacant" are not really vacant or empty; they are merely apartments where no person has a permanent address - there still may be people living there. Workers from elsewhere in the country who work in the city for the week but have their permanent address elsewhere with their family; undocumented migrants, etc. 3) apartments belong to elderly or sick people (cancer etc) who are in a care home or equivalent, but don't want to give up their home because they hope to be able to return, or to old people who clearly are not going to return but whose heirs cannot sell the apartment until the owner has passed away. If it were rented out, the care payments would increase with the amount of the rent income, and the only thing owners would get from renting out is risk of a bad tenant. Yes, no one is living in that apartment just now. Still, it's not primarily a "vehicle for speculation".
ageek123 10y ago
San Francisco has a similar problem. There are many hundreds of "in-law" units that go un-rented because the owner is terrified they will never be able to get rid of the tenant. This article from a local public radio station explains the situation concisely: http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-not-renting http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-...
gech 10y ago
Shame on this comment.

forrestthewoods 10y ago

> It sounds like Paris is regulating to beat a problem that is at least in a a significant part caused by regulation. The solution to regulation is always more regulation.

sonthonax 10y ago
It very possibly is. Society is not a software algorithm.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  No. But at scale members within a society behave in a reliable way. It's often predictable. Sometimes it requires the benefit of hindsight to realize a behavior choice. But going forward it's generally pretty reliable. Those bad behaviors are often incentivized by regulation. And the best fix is often to simply remove those regulations. Not by adding more. Especially when it comes to real estate, zoning, and rent control.

anigbrowl 10y ago

I need something better than anecdotal evidence for your claim that tenancy rights are the primary problem. You can find horror stories about problem tenants in any city, same as you can find horror stories about terrible landlords. Do you have quantitative evidence that documents the scale of this problem? Property vacancies, speculation, rents, and related issues are hardly unique to Paris; this is an unsolved problem in economics precisely because living accommodations are not simply fungible commodities and applying crude economic models to complex economic situations leads to inefficient outcomes.

inuhj 10y ago
IMO you are being a bit lazy here not researching the issue yourself. These kinds of comments are easy to make but hard to respond to. Do your own research and respond with what you find before asking OP to do the same.
- mistermann 10y ago
  ptaipale is the one who made the assertion, the onus is on him to provide evidence, not the person questioning the assertion.
ttoinou 10y ago
Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything. All I can tell you is that here in France property squatter have rights, and the more the original owner awaits before calling the police, the less he has a chance to recover his property and evict squatters. I would be interested in knowing if others country have the same laws ?
- collyw 10y ago
  "Sadly quantitative evidence (i.e. statistics) also don't prove anything." Still better than a single anecdote on the internet.
- ABCLAW 10y ago
  Plenty of other jurisdictions have similar laws. Adverse possession is a common law legal doctrine designed to prevent the non-use of resources by an absent owner.

raverbashing 10y ago

Not something exclusive to Paris http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/james-regan-professional-tenant-evicted-1.3862446 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/james-regan-profession... And if you leave someone in your apartment/house at least sign a contract.

paulddraper 10y ago
A contract saying what? They void their unavoidable tenant rights?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Rent is X Euros per month, but is waived for the 1st N months. A form of rent warranty is required after N months (this might be on the tenancy laws already, I'm not sure) Or, you know, get references before you let anyone live in your place
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    I don't see how any of that helps the situation at hand: how can I use my existing property to give an acquaintance a roof over their heads?

yardie 10y ago

I haven't read the story but there is a lot of misconception in this familiar story. As it is the same in most developed countries once someone moved into a flat it becomes their dwelling. This is independent of rent. If I let a friend stay with me and not pay rent while they get their life together i can't kick them out. The owner is a member of the building association. She agreed to pay maintenance and renovation charges. That is an agreement between her and the association. The tenant did not make that agreement so has no say in it. There is a process to evict someone. This owner sounds like she doesn't want or can't be bothered to follow it. It's a long heartbreaking process that involves courts and police. And due to abuse in the past the judges and police want to be sure every step is followed.

trollsonson 10y ago
I haven't read the article, but here's my comment on it. Everyone knows developed countries must have squatters rights. I haven't researched that, but I'll go ahead and assert it anyway. There are no facts or fact based opinions in my post. I'm gonna practice typing, and you're gonna waste your time reading this. Welcome to HN. I feel smart.

crdoconnor 10y ago

Hoarding of inner city land occurs because inner city land is valuable and naturally scarce. It is valuable because it is possible to leverage it to effectively levy a privatized tax on others for its use (rent). Gold is also hoarded and not used because it is scarce and valuable, not regulation. It feels odd to have to point that out. There is basically one (good) solution to this problem: tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes). That doesn't eliminate scarcity but it reduces the incentive to hoard and it reduces speculation. Increased land value (which in cities is created by the community) would instead accrue to the community via taxes. Hoarding and not using land would lead to heavy losses. Property investment would become more of a normal business where high quality construction matters more than making lucky gambles (like the kind that made Trump rich).

mafribe 10y ago
tax land values higher If you don't also remove, or at least weaken, strict zoning laws, who would be able to pay high property taxes?
kmicklas 10y ago
> tax land values higher (e.g. raise property taxes). More specifically, taxing land irrespective of the value of what's built on top of it.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Ideally LVT, but it isn't necessarily prudent to spend political capital to set up an entirely new form of taxation. Property taxes are still a close enough approximation of LVT in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver and London where the majority of the value of a property is derived from its location.
Applejinx 10y ago
In Vermont USA we have homestead declaration. I declare the home I'm living in as my homestead, can only do it once, and the property taxes are less hardcore because it's my home. I approve of this arrangement. Why, just because land ownership CAN be a money sink for abstracted accumulation of wealth and power, MUST it be that rewarded money sink? Why is it sacrosanct that people should be able to hoard 'location' beyond what they personally use? Note that I don't think there's a real limit to how big of a property can be 'home'. Versailles? Knock yourself out. You figure you should own 12 Versailles, and keep 11 of them empty? Uh nope. There is only so much area on the planet.

plantain 10y ago

Sydney and Melbourne have similar housing bubbles and vacancy rates, despite having extremely oppressive tenant laws.

somecallitblues 10y ago
What laws? Home owners can charge whatever rent they want, evict you with a few weeks notice without giving any reason for it, raise the rent as much as they want etc. There's no affordable housing in either of the cities. Investors are hoarding properties and claiming negative gearing and locking first home buyers out of the market. Renters need better protection in Australia if the government is unwilling to do anything about the negative gearing and housing market, which they said they won't do anything about. After all they're paying off these assholes' properties. Edit: good analysis in this podcast if you're interested http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-11-07/7997896 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/2016-1...
Johnythree 10y ago
Melbourne will soon have a Vacant house tax as well. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vacant-property-tax-expected-to-raise-80m-in-push-to-increase-housing-affordability-20170305-gur4zn.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vacant-property-tax-expect...
toomanybeersies 10y ago
It is possible to have similar symptoms but a different core issue, especially when comparing 2 countries with very different regulations.

Retric 10y ago

The correct solution to this problem is insurance. If the risk is say 0.1% and you get 1k per month in rent for 1 year then. The insurance could pay out up to 1 million and cost 100$ per month leaving a huge net gain. However, even if it takes 3 years to elect someone that's not even close to 1M in damages.

bsder 10y ago

> Paris has very extraordinary tenant protections, even for people who weren't actually tenants and who don't pay their rent. The problem is that for every story about bad tenants, I can find a story about a shitty landlord. And, often, then shitty landlord affects WAY higher a number of people since shitty landlords all too often have multiple properties. This is actually a bit of dilemma in small towns in the US. Many small towns have a very poor rental market, so they have many tenants who can barely pay. This also means that the landlords need to keep rental prices very low--which translates into shitty slumlord rentals. However, if regulation steps in to make the place better, it effectively bankrupts the landlord who then abandons the place and now the city gets the joy of what to do with the abandoned property.

kafkaesq 10y ago

If you're away for a year or two, DON'T give your apartment to let. But the main issue, in the large, with the epidemic of vacant apartments isn't that these people all just happen to be going away for a year or two. It's that the apartments are bought solely as vehicles of speculation (or to store and/or launder wealth) -- and are effectively no longer "living spaces", in any meaningful sense. Then it's now fashionable to frame this as a xenophobic "rich foreigners come and hoard our apartments and cause housing shortage". Yet there's a lot of evidence that this is exactly what's happening (substituting "exacerbate" for "cause"). And it's not "fashionable" or "xenophobic" to call something what it is. It's called speaking plainly and directly.

ptaipale 10y ago
BTW, forgot to add this example of "hoarding". An apartment not used for 70 years... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris-apartment-untouched-70-years-Treasure-trove-finally-revealed-owner-locked-fled-outbreak-WWII.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris...
ptaipale 10y ago
At least where I live (Helsinki region in Finland), the main issue with empty apartments is not that they are bought as vehicles of speculation. It's that there's not that much vacancy to speak of. The numbers are inflated in the discourse, often ignoring several factors: 1) in a rental market, there is a natural vacancy rate of a few percent due to people moving every few ears, and that 2) apartments that are in statistics "vacant" are not really vacant or empty; they are merely apartments where no person has a permanent address - there still may be people living there. Workers from elsewhere in the country who work in the city for the week but have their permanent address elsewhere with their family; undocumented migrants, etc. 3) apartments belong to elderly or sick people (cancer etc) who are in a care home or equivalent, but don't want to give up their home because they hope to be able to return, or to old people who clearly are not going to return but whose heirs cannot sell the apartment until the owner has passed away. If it were rented out, the care payments would increase with the amount of the rent income, and the only thing owners would get from renting out is risk of a bad tenant. Yes, no one is living in that apartment just now. Still, it's not primarily a "vehicle for speculation".

ageek123 10y ago

San Francisco has a similar problem. There are many hundreds of "in-law" units that go un-rented because the owner is terrified they will never be able to get rid of the tenant. This article from a local public radio station explains the situation concisely: http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-not-renting http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-...

gech 10y ago

Shame on this comment.